1. Field of Disclosure
This invention relates generally to mobile communications, and more specifically to techniques for determining caller ID information associated with telephone calls.
2. Description of the Related Art
Users of a mobile device can send and receive telephone calls and text messages to and from a wide range of telephone numbers. Mobile devices include, for example, cellular telephones. Many mobile devices are capable of saving and accessing information related to telephone calls and text messages. A mobile device may include an address book that lists contacts stored by a user of the device along with telephone numbers and other information about the contacts. The mobile device may also store a history of telephone numbers corresponding to outbound and inbound calls, and may store a history of sent and received text messages. The user can use this information in order to answer particular telephone calls that may be urgent to the user or to screen particular telephone calls. However, if a telephone number is not stored on the user's mobile device, the user cannot determine whether the telephone call is from a contact that the user wants to communicate with or from a third party that a user wants to screen.
Phone operators may provide caller ID information for an incoming or outgoing telephone call by matching a telephone number against a particular database. For example, a mobile or a landline telephone operator may maintain a database of user telephone numbers associated with a user-provided billing name. Thus, a telephone operator may provide the billing name associated with a particular telephone number. However, most databases associated with a mobile telephone operator are incomplete because telephone operators only have access to billing information associated with their own customers. In general, telephone operators do not share their customer billing information with their competitors. Additionally, the user-provided billing name may be an inaccurate description of a telephone number in a case where one billing name is provided for several associated telephone numbers such as employer-provided telephone plans or telephone numbers in a family or a group payment plan. Finally, users of prepaid phones generally do not provide a billing name to mobile phone operators, thus a vast number of billing names associated with mobile device phone numbers are not available to mobile telephone operators. In practice, major mobile telephone operators in the US generally do not provide caller ID services to its customers at this time.